Flavors.me is a new tool that promises to help you corral all your digital ponies into one place. According their website:

Flavors.me allows anyone to create an elegant website using personal content from around the Internet. Ideal for personal homepages, lifestreaming, splash and microsites, celebrity fan pages, commercial promotion, brand marketing – and everything in between.

Flavors.me from Jack Zerby on Vimeo.

Although still in restricted Beta testing, Flavors.me could become a powerful tool for use in personal branding, a phrase that came up more than once in a recent webinar entitled Bringing Creativity to Your Job Search. The webinar’s host, Joshua Waldman of CareerEnlightenment.net, says this in a recent post:

A resume is a necessary evil… [But] too many job seekers spend all their time polishing off a resume to submit in an application process, despite recent statistics. In one study done by Manpower, 40% of jobs actually come from networking. Only 16% come from job boards, and therefore resumes alone.

Waldman suggests that there are three main questions an interviewer needs to answer in order to make a decision about hiring you: Do I like you? What motivates you? Can you do the job? As Waldman points out, the first two questions are primarily questions of personality.

Make way for the rise of the personal brand.

To make a careful distinction, the rise of the personal brand is not about the commoditization of individuals (although for years career services folks have been teaching us to “sell ourselves” without any backlash to the terminology). This is actually an opportunity for personalities to shine; a spotlight on the very thing that makes each of us unique. Such a paradigm shift should come as a welcome relief to those (like me) who have always felt it difficult to communicate the sum total of who they are in a twenty minute interview. Imagine being able to supply a potential employer with one link (hello, Flavor.me) to multiple options for getting to know you better: Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Flickr, your blog, etc.

Learning to Self-Edit

Building a personal brand does not happen without a certain amount of strategy and personal responsibility. In social media spaces, honesty is always the best policy. No one likes being “gamed,” and there is a general disdain for pretending to be someone or something you’re not. But with that said, you should think about your audience (friends, family, co-workers, potential employers) and develop appropriate filters (permission settings in Facebook are great place to start). In short, learn to self-edit; just because you can say something online doesn’t necessarily mean you should. Photos and detailed accounts of what happened to you this one time at band camp may not be the kind of brand recognition you are looking for.